_K._ What comfort man? How is't with aged Gaunt?

_G._ O, how that name befits my composition!
Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old, &c.

where, as he explains,

Misery makes sport to mock itself.

This is a humorous indulgence of fancy, led on by the associations
of a word; a pun is led off by the _sound_ of a word in pursuit of
nonsense; though the variety of its ingenuity may refuse so simple a
definition.

[Sidenote: An indirect advantage of homophones.]

It is true that a real good may sometimes come indirectly from a word
being a homophone, because its inconvenience in common parlance may
help to drive it into a corner where it can be retained for a special
signification: and since the special significance of any word is its
first merit, and the coinage of new words for special differentiation
is difficult and rare, we may rightly welcome any fortuitous means for
their provision. Examples of words specialized thus from homophones
are _brief_ (a lawyer's brief), _hose_ (water-pipe), _bolt_ (of door),
_mail_ (postal), _poll_ (election), &c.[11]

[Footnote 11: It would follow that, supposing there were any expert
academic control, it might be possible to save some of our perishing
homophones by artificial specialization. Such words are needed, and
if a homophone were thus specialized in some department of life or